Personality dimensions and attitudes towards peace and war

Abstract

Purpose. The present study examined the relationship between major personality dimensions and attitudes towards peace and war.Design. Three samples--two consisting of British psychology students (N = 64 and 121) and one ofIsraeli students (N = 80), responded to measures of some or all of: Five-Factor inventory; SYMLOG trait form; General Survey (GS) including authoritarianism; Attitudes towards Peace and War; specific attitudes towards peace and war policy.Findings. The general attitude measures were associated with the specific attitudes. Both were associated with authoritarianism but not consistently with other personality dimensions.Limitations: descriptive findings might not generalize..Research Implications: Authoritarianism should be measured in any studies of attitudes related to peace, war, conflict and structural violence.Practical Implications: Practitioners of peace education may first need to address high authoritarianism and low integrative complexity. Also, countering structural violence related, for instance, to poverty or prejudice/discrimination may require a comprehensive approach including collaborative work with clinical psychologists applying both implicit and explicit assessment tools.Originality/value: Documenting links (and lack of them) among personality variables and attitudes towards peace and war has practical and theoretical value-and may contribute to organizational schemes shaped by personality structure and bearing implications for negotiations. In terms of a paradigm by Morton Deutsch, our results show individual differences in, and associations among, variables relating to the remediable likelihood of parties being differentially likely to find themselves (a) in negatively vs. positively interdependent situations and (b) carrying out effective instead of "bungling" actions.

The relationship between parenting styles and peace attitudes

“…A significant portion of literature investigated the association between measures of peace and one of the most wellestablished models to describe human personality: the Big 5 model or Five Factor Personality Model (FFM; Costa and McCrae, 2013). Different studies found that peace attitudes were associated with: extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness (Eryilmaz, 2014); openness and agreeableness (Blumberg et al, 2017); and openness to experience, conscientiousness, emotional stability and agreeableness (Cavarra et al, 2020). Furthermore, relationships were found with measures of intrapersonal peace (Nelson, 2014), such as personality congruence and coherence (Sheldon and Kasser, 1995), selfacceptance (Ryff, 1989) and self-compassion (Leary et al, 2007;Neff et al, 2007) while being inversely correlated with negative affect, lower well-being, depression (Emmons and King, 1988), internal conflict (Higgins, 1987) and, ultimately, unpeaceful emotional states (Shallcross et al, 2013).…”

Are attitudes toward peace and war the two sides of the same coin? Evidence to the contrary from a French validation of the Attitudes Toward Peace and War Scale

“…Subsequent research has supported the convergent and divergent validity of the APWS by examining moral psychology [ 11 ], social representations [ 12 ], and personality variables [ 13 ]. For instance, using a measure of the Big Five Inventory, one of the most frequently used paradigms for personality traits, Blumberg, Zeligman, Appel, and Tibon-Czopp [ 13 ] found that the dimension of agreeableness, which expresses a prosocial and communal orientation toward others vs. antagonism, was associated (positively and negatively, respectively) with attitudes toward peace and attitudes toward war. In contrast, the dimension of openness to experience, which expresses the breadth, depth, and complexity of an individuals’ mental and experiential life, was (negatively) associated with attitudes toward war but not with attitudes toward peace.…”

Peace and personality: The relationship between the five-factor model’s personality traits and the Peace Attitude Scale.

“…Eryilmaz (2014) reported moderate, significant correlations between peace attitudes and both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness in elderly and adolescent subjects and that a model comprising such dimensions along with Extraversion explained 55% of peace attitudes variance. Blumberg, Zeligman, Appel, and Tibon-Czopp (2017) observed that Openness to Experience and Agreeableness were positively associated with peace scales and negatively associated with war scales, whereas measures of Aggressive Mistrust correlated negatively with Agreeableness and Emotional Stability.…”